MAIL

NO WRITER ATTRIBUTED
June 7, 1939

To the Editor of the Crimson:

That each generation of undergraduates should exercise its prerogative to tar and feather the teaching staff -- typographically speaking--is a healthy thing, and the most recent essay in that direction, Mr. Bunde's philippic in the Progressive, manifests unusual insight not only into problems of pedagogy but into the larger question of a university's true function. Mr. Bunde, by and large, has done a good job, but the effectiveness of his criticism is blunted by over-indulgence in harsh and intemperate personalisms. There are ways of getting at the same end without resorting to personal abuse.

Quite aside from the method of attack, Mr. Bunde's article is open to question on another count. For an impressionistic commentator, Bunde makes a pretty good score, but it is to be expected that his justice might miscarry in some instances. And notable among these latter is the case of Professor Usher who has been characterized as "neither an economist nor, in the true sense, an historian," but rather "a collector of details--a hard working, conscientious gatherer of economic facts." Usher has done an excellent job in Ec. 133 (where I happen to have heard him) in tracing the pattern of economic development, and Mr. Bunde's failure to catch even a glimmering reflection of this pattern in the undergraduate course would indicate an aberration into adolescence on his part, quite in contrast with the incisive maturity of his judgments elsewhere. Professor Usher cuts loose from the conventional, integrated, year-by-year study of economic history, for the greater fission of economic processes as measured by the more exact tools of quantitative analysis. If Mr. Bunde insists on spoon-feeding, he is turning away from one of the richest intellectual feasts that Harvard offers. Home Economicus '32.